The bag by the door and twenty on the count

The key turned in the lock at twenty to nine. Dinner had been set for half past seven, and since half past seven my phone had lain face up on the table without a single message.

He put his bag down by the door, took off his shoes and started talking from the hallway: the ring road was at a standstill, his phone had died, the charger was at the office. I let him get to the end without interrupting. Then I said:

“Bedroom. The wall.”

He stopped mid-sentence and went. The bag stayed where it was.

The wall

Our wall is the stretch between the wardrobe and the window, a metre and a half of bare wallpaper. He stands facing it, twenty centimetres away, arms at his sides, palms open, eyes on the skirting board. Forehead off the wall, no shifting from foot to foot. He speaks only when asked. It isn’t the punishment yet, it’s the waiting for it, and he knows which of the two is harder.

I went back to the kitchen, poured myself tea and sat where I could see the bedroom door. Dinner was going cold on the stove. He had been cooking it since six, I could tell by the pans, and that only made me angrier. I was hungry and I was angry, and for a second I thought I could just eat and deal with it later. I didn’t. You can’t put these things off; by morning they turn into “oh, never mind”.

While he stood there, I thought about what I put him against the wall for at all. My list is short, and in five years nothing has been added to it. Late without warning. A change of tone when he’s tired: not the words, the voice, that one with the edge in it. I can’t describe the tone in words, but I know it from the first syllable, and he knows that I know. Deciding something on his own that concerns us both, however small. And whining after the decision has already been made. Four items. Everything else I either forgive on the spot, or it isn’t an offence.

Twenty minutes. The tea was finished. I went into the bedroom and stood behind him. He didn’t turn.

“What have you understood?”

“That I didn’t call.”

“Your phone was dead. What else?”

A pause. His shoulders rose and fell.

“That I could have borrowed someone’s phone. And that I started explaining before you asked.”

“Twenty. After dinner. Go and heat it up.”

We ate. He ate in silence and I didn’t: I told him about my day, because the punishment hadn’t started yet and the evening was already under way. He answered evenly. He only looked at the clock twice. I didn’t tell him I was looking too.

Twenty

The belt lives in the second drawer of the chest, folded in two. He took it out himself, handed it to me on open palms and took off his trousers. The cage stays on for this; I never unlock him for it. He once asked me to take it off so he could lie more comfortably. I told him comfortable wasn’t the point. He lay chest down over the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, arms stretched forward, hands gripping the bedspread.

“You count. Lose it and we start over.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

The first stroke I always lay the same way: dead centre, not hard, so that he hears the belt and remembers. “One.” The second the same. “Two.” From the fifth I go lower, where he sits, and there he starts drawing breath before each one. “Five. Six. Seven.” His voice cracked on seven, and on eight he said “nine”.

I lowered the belt.

“From the beginning.”

He didn’t argue and he didn’t beg. He pressed his forehead into the bedspread, breathed out and said: “One.” I struck. After that the twenty went cleanly; I heard every number in full, to the last sound, and on “twenty” he didn’t exhale but waited to see if there would be more. There wasn’t. Twenty-eight in all, and the last six I laid where it was already burning, because otherwise they don’t count.

“Stand.”

He got up and went to the wall, as he had stood before dinner, only without his trousers, with red stripes that would be purple by morning. Five minutes on the timer on my phone. I sat on the bed and watched his back, watched him breathe: fast at first, then slower and slower. The cage between his legs, the stripes above it, and nothing in between to be touched, not by him and not by me, for another five minutes.

The timer went. He turned round on his own, without a command, because that is allowed, and said:

“Thank you, Mistress.”

I ran my palm down his back from the top to the stripes and stopped on them. Hot.

“Clean slate?”

“Yes.”

That means: tonight’s lateness is never mentioned again. Not tomorrow at breakfast, not in a row a month from now. He knows that, and I think it’s for that “yes” that he lies over the bed without a sound. It’s harder for me: two days later I want to say, “and on Thursday you…”. I don’t say it. Otherwise the twenty-eight were for nothing.

He brought the cream; I put it on myself. He slept on his stomach, face towards me, and was asleep before I turned off the light.

Morning

At eight I came out of the bathroom and saw my grey coat on the chair in the hallway. Not the one I had hung on the end hook the night before, the other one, the warmer one. He had looked at the forecast and decided for me.

“Hang it back up. The wall. Five minutes.”

He hung it up and stood. I glanced at the clock: five minutes I could afford, but only just. I stood beside him in my shoes, bag on my shoulder, and said nothing. Neither did he. Once his lips moved, as if he wanted to say something about the frost outside, and he didn’t. He must have felt the stripes under his trousers every second of it, standing on the same spot as the night before.

“Now go.”

“Thank you.”

He handed me the coat I had chosen, and I was cold in it all the way to the metro. That evening the coat wasn’t mentioned. Neither was the lateness. In the drawer of his desk lies a sheet of paper with four lines in my handwriting, written five years ago, and I haven’t changed a word of it since.

• Write your reasons down on paper. Three or four. He should know the list by heart, and you shouldn’t be inventing a fifth in the heat of the moment.
• Send him to the wall at once; dinner can wait. A reckoning postponed to the morning is no reckoning by morning.
• He counts, out loud. Lose the count and start over, no discussion. You hold the belt, he holds the numbers.
• Afterwards, ask “clean slate?” and wait for the answer. Then keep your own word: the old thing is never brought up.
• Punish him for deciding on his own even when he guessed right. The coat was warmer. I didn’t choose it, and that is the offence.